I was intrigued by a recent manifesto here at the Libertarian Institute, “Libertarianism Requires a ‘Subjective Morality,’” by Sean Dolan. The author boldly denies that libertarianism is “an objective, universal code that dictates right from wrong.” I believe that I understand what is Dolan’s fundamental concern, namely, that libertarians may sometimes seem rather dogmatic about their moral views. I reject, however, the idea that libertarianism itself is an intrinsically or inherently “subjective” theory.
What I regard as the confusion here turns in part on terminology, but also reflects a failure to distinguish levels of ethical discourse. Hardly anyone ever even uses the word ‘metaethics’ in discussing politics or morality in the real world, but philosophers do, and they draw a sharp distinction between metaethics and normative ethics. The former involves theories about the status of morality, while the latter provides prescriptions for action.
A normative theory of ethics provides an answer to the question: “What should I do?” Many normative theories offer ways of determining which action to take in the face of conflicting possibilities. According to utilitarianism, for example, one should always act so as to maximize the utility (or happiness) of the greatest number (of relevant moral persons). A form of utilitarianism undergirds much of socialist ideology and is illustrated by the popular outbursts against rich people seen throughout social media, according to which it is somehow unfair or wrong for there to be people living in penury when there are also extraordinarily wealthy persons (such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) whose fortunes could be divvied up to improve the plight of everyone less well-off than themselves.
A far more familiar normative theory to most people would be the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Depending upon what a person regards as acceptable treatment, the Golden Rule may or may not proscribe any particular action. A masochist, for example, may find it perfectly acceptable to torture other people, since he would presumably accept such treatment of himself.
A stricter, purely deontological (rule-based, rather than consequence-based) normative theory asserts that there are things which one should never do. The Ten Commandments of the Bible are an example of a list of normative principles by which to live. Thou Shalt Not Kill. The principle is stated categorically, and the only place where subjectivity comes in play is in determining how to interpret the moral precept. Does “Thou Shalt Not Kill” proscribe all acts of homicide? Or is there an exception for self-defense? If so, is it true or false that a bombing campaign in a land far away can be considered an act of self-defense? Unfortunately, that reading has become commonplace among political leaders who routinely deny that they are doing anything wrong—and indeed posture themselves as morally righteous—when they act in ways which facilitate or directly effect the deaths of innocent people who happen to be located in the vicinity of what have been determined to be mortal enemies. On several different grounds, I argue against such a reading in War and Delusion.
Metaethical theories, in contrast to normative theories, deal with the status of morality. Someone may believe in the Ten Commandments, for example, because he was taught Christianity from an early age, but is that normative theory universally (or absolutely) binding? The simplest way of delineating the two exhaustive and exclusive metaethical theories is through posing this question: “Is there a single true morality which applies to all people at all times, regardless of the place where they happen to live and regardless of what they happen to believe?” The answer is either “yes” or “no.”
To respond to the question in the affirmative is to assert absolutism: there is at least one moral principle which applies to everyone everywhere. Is any action categorically wrong, no matter the circumstances? The gratuitous torture of innocent children would seem to be one candidate. When people claim that murder, the commission of intentional and premeditated homicide with malice aforethought, is wrong, they believe that morality is absolutely binding on all people everywhere. To answer the question in the negative, to deny that any particular action is always and everywhere wrong, is to assert moral relativism. According to moral relativists, normative theories of morality are not objective theories binding on everyone everywhere, regardless of their circumstances. Instead, moralities are frameworks of practices and principles created by different groups of people at different times, which apply only to the persons who freely choose to accept them.
Now, there is a sense in which the commitment to liberty intrinsic to libertarianism may seem to imply a sort of “subjectivism,” as Dolan maintains. But the dogmatism which he evidently finds so distasteful can in fact be traced to and derives from the core thesis of libertarianism, which is an absolutist position, albeit a minimalist one. Most obviously, libertarianism, with its principle of nonaggression, asserts that it is always and everywhere wrong to impinge on anyone else’s liberty to do anything else, so long as what they are doing is not impinging on anyone else’s liberty.
As always, the complexity here arises in interpreting what the invalidating action—form of coercion—may consist in. If someone is literally attempting to kill you, then you may of course defend yourself from that person, according to libertarianism. Equally obvious is that to physically harm a person who is not in the process of attempting to harm you or anyone else would be to violate the nonaggression principle. If a you shoot a helpless, unarmed child in the head, then you have violated this principle and thereby committed an immoral action. If you steal money from someone (rather than persuading him to surrender it), then you have wronged him.
To take a case in the news: if you have sex with a minor, as appears to have happened many times at Jeffrey Epstein’s island, then even if the victim in question appeared to agree to the acts, the permission granted may be invalid because the person was not sufficiently mature to be able to make a fully informed and responsible decision. The action was coerced in the sense that the weaker party was not in the position to be able to make a fully autonomous decision about what would be in his or her best interests to do. In that sort of case, the point where subjectivism might seem to play a role would be in determining what the age of consent is.
Despite the many obvious gray areas, often involving the age of consent, there are enough examples of clear-cut violations of the nonaggression principle to qualify libertarianism as an absolutist theory of morality, even if one may disagree with other people on the limits of coercion in some particular cases. The entire debate over whether young children should be allowed to undergo irreversible medical treatments with the aim of changing their gender, on the grounds that they have allegedly been born in the wrong body, turns on whether not those children are in fact mature enough to make such decisions for themselves and, if not, whether their parents in consultation with medical doctors should be able to consent to such treatments on behalf of their progeny.
In society as it stands, minors are not allowed to drive, to drink alcohol, or to vote, so it would seem that the question whether they themselves have the autonomy needed to be able to make irrevocably life-altering changes (such as surgery) to their bodies has already been settled. Just as young children may change their minds several times about which profession they wish to pursue, they may also change their mind about their sexual orientation and gender. Precisely this has happened in a number of documented cases of confused children who underwent gender transitions and then later realized that they had made a mistake, having been persuaded by other, more powerful, parties to believe that the source of their unhappiness was their own physical body, not other factors. Detransitioners have spoken out to reveal how they were misled by medical professionals and psychologists, and in some cases their parents as well, to believe that they suffered from gender dysphoria, when in fact they were simply going through the often challenging process of physical maturation, during which hormones ebb and flow and affect one’s mood and reasoning capacity in a variety of unpredictable ways.
The child transitioning question might seem, then, to be decided, but card-carrying libertarians such as former Libertarian Party presidential nominee Chase Oliver have expressed support for the practice, probably under the assumption that there are genuinely transgender persons who may be aware of this fact from an early age. The problem, however, is that children are also notoriously impressionable, and while there may be a tiny percentage of persons who will remain happy with such a radical and life-altering choice in later years, the damage done to those who were misled based on the information available from social media groups, including those frequented by transactivists, suggests that extreme caution should be exercised in order to avoid irrevocably harming young persons who may be especially prone to manipulation by influencers.
The point here is that while libertarians may disagree on the details of how to apply their nonaggression principle (NAP), that principle itself is nonnegotiable. Anyone who denies that it is wrong to violate the NAP is not in fact a libertarian. Chase Oliver affirms the NAP and therefore is a libertarian, whether or not you agree with his application of the principle in any particular case.
I discussed the connections between libertarianism and existentialism here some years ago, and concluded that they bear important similarities to one another, as both celebrate human liberty and reject coercion. The primary difference between existentialism and libertarianism, I find, is that existentialism is even more minimalist than libertarianism. According to existentialism, the only true constraint on a free person’s actions is the law of non-hypocrisy or non-contradiction (Jean-Paul Sartre referred to violations of non-hypocrisy as mauvaise foi, or bad faith). In contrast to existentialism, libertarianism, with its inviolable nonaggression principle (NAP), does not permit that so long as you are willing to allow other people to impinge on your liberty, then you may do so to them (a somewhat unorthodox twist on “do unto others…”).
My impression is that Dolan’s objection to “objectivism” is more an expression of disdain for dogmatism than anything else, and it is true that libertarians sometimes give off the impression of holding absolutely true moral positions, most often because they themselves have become convinced that they are straightforwardly applying the nonaggression principle in absolutely unequivocal cases, when in fact they are offering a substantive interpretation with which other self-proclaimed libertarians may or may not agree. Abortion would be a good case here, where many libertarians regard the procedure as violating the NAP in the case of unborn persons, while others insist that a fetus is not a moral person in the proper sense, or that the fetus has no inherent right to hijack or occupy the pregnant woman’s body for nine months.
As is illustrated by the most controversial cases, such as abortion, there is always room for debate in interpreting the proper application of the principle of nonaggression, but libertarianism is not “subjectivist” in the sense that “anything goes.” If libertarianism is to mean anything, and self-proclaimed libertarians certainly believe that it does, it is that human beings are free, conscious, and sentient beings with the capacity to determine how to lead their own lives, and this should never be taken from them, provided that they are not preventing anyone else from doing the same. If you impinge on the liberty of another person who is not currently impinging on anyone else’s liberty, then you have done something wrong. It does not matter who you are, where or when you live. Precisely because their theory is minimalist, but neither subjectivist or relativist, libertarians prefer limited government and free associations rather than artificially imposed constraints devised by bureaucrats to control other people under a quasi-utilitarian pretext of helping the less fortunate or successful in society today.
One of the most interesting debates in considering what morality requires is whether a positive action, for example, the direct commission of homicide, is equivalent to a negative action, for example, permitting people to starve to death. The consistent libertarian denies that anyone has a right to the provision of anything which requires that it be taken from anyone else involuntarily. In this view, it is obviously worse to murder someone then to refuse to give him food, even if he is starving. This may seem in some ways illogical, since the outcome may be the same (death), but it is a position intuitively accepted by most people in society today, at least judging by their actions.
When self-styled left-leaning senators such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren inveigh against rich people, they do not practice what they preach if they have any liquid assets whatsoever which they do not share with persons worse off than themselves. Whatever they may say about the so-called “obscene” wealth of persons such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, those who propose taking money away from persons wealthier than themselves do not, generally speaking, charitably donate all of their “excess” belongings to poor people. Nor do they invite the homeless to sleep under the same roof as themselves, even when they have multiple properties which could, in theory, be offered to persons in need. No one is preventing anyone from making such charitable donations, and when wealthy persons take advantage of tax loopholes, they are benefiting from laws ratified by some of the very politicians who persist in insisting that the rich do not pay “their fair share” to society. (I regard the comportment of “rich-shaming” politicians as a classic case of mauvaise foi.)
I believe that Sean Dolan’s concern is not without merit, but he incorrectly assumes that to reject the dogmatism sometimes seen among libertarians is tantamount to asserting that the theory is subjectivistic. It is not. The “subjectivity” of which Dolan speaks inheres only in the contentious assertion by some libertarians of certain normative principles which go well beyond the NAP. You may or may not, for example, agree that the government’s recent decision, under the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) platform championed by Secretary of Heath and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to outlaw the use of synthetic dyes or certain sweeteners in food stuffs is a good idea. But that is your personal, subjective opinion, and there is good reason for believing that libertarianism itself would not sanction such policies, for they impinge on the right of free individuals to decide for themselves what to ingest. The same holds true, obviously, for the criminalization of the use of drugs. According to libertarianism, what free and fully informed and consenting adult human beings decide to do within the privacy of their own homes should never be the province of the government to decide.
